Margaret Laurence's The Diviners and Alice Munro's "The Turkey Season" and "Epilogue: The Photographer" use photographs to express their somewhat disparate ideas about reality and art. While Laurence is concerned to decipher a pattern over time, Munro is interested in the unresolvable enigmas of each moment. In The Diviners, photographs are arranged and ordered so that meaning becomes narrative; in Munro's stories, by contrast, there are multiple versions of reality to be read from any given photograph, so that meaning is not narrative at all, but rather something that literally occurrs in "flashes." These contradictory perceptions of the photograph's relation to life and to literature perhaps explain why Laurence is chiefly a novelist, while Munro is a short-story writer.
